Susan Roberta Katz is Professor of International and Multicultural Education at the University of San Francisco. She was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Hungary in Spring 2003. Her doctoral dissertation, Where the Streets Cross the Classroom: Latino Students’ Perspectives on Cultural Identity in City Schools and Neighborhood Gangs (UC Berkeley, 1994) won first place in the 1996 Outstanding Dissertation Competition of the National Association of Bilingual Education. This research study was based upon her many years of teaching in San Francisco public schools.
Professor Katz’s scholarly publications have appeared in such journals as Teachers College Record, Urban Education, Social Justice, and English Education. Her most current research involves graduates of the Gandhi School in Pécs, Hungary, the only college preparatory school for Roma students in the world.
Professor Katz is on the editorial boards of the journals, Social Justice, Intercultural Education, and Multicultural Education.
This issue of IMPACT could not appear at a better time - a moment of both severe crisis and tremendous opportunity for urban youth. Crisis because, thus far in California alone, taxpayers have shelled out $66.2 billion to fund the illegitimate war in Iraq. This amount of money could provide 24,720,000 children with health care, establish 7,917, 351 Head Start daycare centers, and offer scholarships to 9,947,258 university students.1 Crisis because, in addition to the financial drain of the war, Governor Schwarzenegger has proposed massive budget cuts in all stated-supported services for 2008-2009, amounting to a reduction of $4.4 billion in K-12 education, equivalent to $785 for each student in California's public schools.2 The impact of these cuts on education as well as health care and welfare services will be especially catastrophic for our most vulnerable youth in large, urban areas.
So, if these days are so dark, where lies the hope and opportunity? It is centered in youth empowerment, in the increase of youth-led organizations taking control over their own lives and communities. Since our government has clearly abdicated its social responsibility to care for its children, our teens and young adults have mobilized to do it themselves, tapping their own human resources of energy, creativity and hard work. The opportunity is clearly visible in the case studies presented in this issue of IMPACT.
First is the example of the Youth Leadership Council of Alameda County, which has developed a youth service delivery system for neglected, unincorporated communities in the East Bay. (See article by Hilary Sohcot-Bass). Second is the City/County of San Francisco's Youth Commission, which builds leadership among young people to make change in their own communities. (See article by Rachel Antrobus and Diana Pang).
The third example is Y-PLAN (Youth- Plan, Learn, Act, Now!) based at UC Berkeley. Y-PLAN utilizes citizen participation theory to pair Bay Area high school students with UC graduate mentors and local agencies to develop a collective solution to a real urban problem (see article by Ariel H. Bierbaum and Deborah L. McKoy). Finally, the Berkeley High School Student Court has turned the school's punitive discipline policy on its head by creating a student-based alternative. The BHS Student Court has confronted the reality that suspension from school provides no solution to discipline problems; in fact, it only aggravates the dilemma by increasing the marginalization of certain groups of students. The Student Court takes justice in its own hands, in the true spirit of youth empowerment. (See article by Joshua Daniels and David Luu).
Despite all the social and economic challenges we face today, this is an exciting time for youth activism. Thank you to the editors and writers of IMPACT for documenting this positive spirit of change and hope.
1See www.nationalpriorities.org.
2See www.cbp.org.